Iberianspices

Tuesday, 20 September 2016

Turmeric the new wonder food

The story below is from the BBC website.

Bold health claims have been made for the power of turmeric. Is there anything in them, asks Michael Mosley.

Turmeric
is a spice which in its raw form looks a bit like ginger root, but when
it's ground down you get a distinctive yellowy orange powder that's
very popular in South Asian cuisine. Until recently the place you would
most likely encounter turmeric would be in chicken tikka masala, one of
Britain's most popular dishes.
These days, thanks to claims that
it can improve everything from allergies to depression, it's become
incredibly trendy, not just cooked and sprinkled on food but added to
drinks like tea. Turmeric latte anyone?
Now I'm usually very
cynical about such claims, but in the case of turmeric I thought there
could be something to it. There are at least 200 different compounds in
turmeric, but there's one that scientists are particularly interested
in. It gives this spice its colour. It's called curcumin.
Thousands
of scientific papers have been published looking at turmeric and
curcumin in the laboratory - some with promising results. But they've
mainly been done in mice, using unrealistically high doses. There have
been few experiments done in the real world, on humans.Find out more about the experiment
This
is exactly the sort of situation where we on Trust Me like to make a
difference. So we tracked down leading researchers from across the
country and with their help recruited nearly 100 volunteers from the
North East to do a novel experiment. Few of our volunteers ate foods
containing turmeric on a regular basis.
Then we divided them into three groups.
We
asked one group to consume a teaspoon of turmeric every day for six
weeks, ideally mixed in with their food. Another group were asked to
swallow a supplement containing the same amount of turmeric, and a third
group were given a placebo, or dummy pill.
The volunteers who
were asked to consume a teaspoon of turmeric a day were ingenious about
what they added it to, mixing it with warm milk or adding it to yoghurt.
Not everyone was enthusiastic about the taste, with comments ranging
from "awful" to "very strong and lingering".
But what effect was
eating turmeric having on them? We decided to try and find out using a
novel test developed at University College, London, by Prof Martin
Widschwendter and his team.

Prof Widschwendter is not particularly interested in turmeric but he
is interested in how cancers start. His team have been comparing tissue
samples taken from women with breast cancer and from women without it
and they've found a change that happens to the DNA of cells well before
they become cancerous.
The change is in the "packaging" of the
genes. It's called DNA methylation. It's a bit like a dimmer switch
that can turn the activity of the gene up or down.
The exciting
thing is that if it is detected in time this change can, potentially, be
reversed, before the cell turns cancerous. DNA methylation may explain
why, for instance, your risk of developing lung cancer drops
dramatically once you give up smoking. It could be that the unhealthy
methylation of genes, caused by tobacco smoke, stops or reverses once
you quit.
So we asked Prof Widschwendter whether testing the DNA
methylation patterns of our volunteers' blood cells at the start and end
of the experiment would reveal any change in their risk of cancer and
other diseases, like allergies. It was something that had not been done
before.

Perennial herbaceous plant native to South Asia

Spice is gathered from the plants rhizomes (roots)

As well as being used in Indian food, turmeric is used in traditional medicine and as a dyeing agent

Turmeric recipes from BBC Food
Fortunately
he was very enthusiastic. "We were delighted," he said, "to be involved
in this study, because it is a proof of principle study that opens
entirely new windows of opportunity to really look into how we can
predict preventive measures, particularly for cancer."
So what, if anything, happened?
When I asked him that, he pulled out his laptop and slowly began to speak.
"We didn't find any changes in the group taking the placebo," he told me. That was not surprising.
"The supplement group also didn't also show any difference," he went on.
That was surprising and somewhat disappointing.
"But
the group who mixed turmeric powder into their food," he continued,
"there we saw quite substantial changes. It was really exciting, to be
honest. We found one particular gene which showed the biggest
difference. And what's interesting is that we know this particular gene
is involved in three specific diseases: depression, asthma and eczema,
and cancer. This is a really striking finding."

It certainly is. But why did we see changes only in those eating turmeric, not in those taking the same amount as a supplement?
Dr
Kirsten Brandt, who is a senior lecturer at Newcastle University and
who helped run the experiment, thinks it may have something to do with
the way the turmeric was consumed.
"It could be," she told me,
"that adding fat or heating it up makes the active ingredients more
soluble, which would make it easier for us to absorb the turmeric. It
certainly gives us something, to work on, to try to find out exactly
what's happening."
She also told me, because our volunteers all
tried consuming their turmeric in different ways, that we can be
confident it was the turmeric that was making the difference and not
some other ingredient used to make, say, chicken tikka masala.
There
is a lot more research that needs to be done, including repeating the
experiment to see if these findings can be confirmed. But in light of
what we've discovered will I be consuming more of the stuff? Probably.
It helps that I like the taste and I've already begun experimenting with
things like adding it with a touch of chilli to an omelette.